System.out.println(“Almost done!”)

Now for those who understand programming language, this title would seem very familiar. For those who think it’s a bit strange, it’s just a Java code in order to print the line “Almost done!” for the user to see it while using a java program.

Me and my colleagues who have a medical background have been studying basics of Java programming language and other basic IT related topics for about 2 months and we even programmed a small library system using the basics that we’ve learnt. I must say that it was really both fun and exhausting, but we were all very pleased with the outcomes.

We’re about to finish the current course which we attend at Stockholm’s University (Health Informatics is a joint master’s programme between Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm’s University) and right now all we have to do is just to write some essays and deliver them before the end of November.

The whole purpose of this course is to acquire very basic knowledge about IT and most importantly is to be able to understand the language that IT specialists speak in order to be able to work in harmony with them.

Apart from learning a programming language, I found the course very interesting and I learned a lot of new facts. The most important one of them is “Computers and smartphones aren’t really smart!” I guess that was kind of disappointing for me (a real computer and smartphones lover), but unfortunately it’s the truth. They simply run according to pre-written commands and it’s us (users) who decide which of them to be run. The only “smart” thing about them is actually the people who programmed them to work because they are the ones who thought about different situations and how the machine should react to them.

Currently our colleagues who have an IT background are busy studying Anatomy, Physiology and more in order to have a better understanding of the human body and consequently the Healthcare Systems. Their target is also to be able to understand the language spoken by healthcare professionals in order to provide them with the optimal solutions using their IT background and the newly acquired healthcare knowledge.

After the current course(s), we’ll start together (students with medical and IT backgrounds) a new course at Karolinska Institutet and I’m really looking forward to talking about our different experiences while we tried to learn how to understand each others’ languages.